


we never go out of style

by bradleymartin



Category: The Society (TV 2019)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Actors, F/M, Friends With Benefits
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-07
Updated: 2020-09-07
Packaged: 2021-03-07 00:08:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,884
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26343886
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bradleymartin/pseuds/bradleymartin
Summary: She doesn’t like the flashing of the cameras — blinding even in the daylight — but she does like the way his hand always tightens in hers, as though she’s the one thing he can’t bear to be separated from. It’s just the two of them against the world.The paparazzi feel like their penance, the price they have to pay to spend the day together. Always the night, too — not a sign of their fragile willpower, but something more akin to predestination. Allie’s addiction to him is only exacerbated with every touch. When she goes home, she tries not to look, but she can’t help it. The photos of them are always so easy to find, accompanying so-called news articles speculating on either forever or disaster, never in between.All she can think is that she likes the way the two of them look together.
Relationships: Harry Bingham/Allie Pressman
Comments: 5
Kudos: 66





	we never go out of style

She doesn’t like the flashing of the cameras — blinding even in the daylight — but she does like the way his hand always tightens in hers, as though she’s the one thing he can’t bear to be separated from. It’s just the two of them against the world. 

The paparazzi feel like their penance, the price they have to pay to spend the day together. Always the night, too — not a sign of their fragile willpower, but something more akin to predestination. Allie’s addiction to him is only exacerbated with every touch. When she goes home, she tries not to look, but she can’t help it. The photos of them are always so easy to find, accompanying so-called news articles speculating on either forever or disaster, never in between.

All she can think is that she likes the way the two of them look together. 

Him, cool and collected, expression unreadable. His brown curls pushed back on his forehead, except that one stray curl that always escapes loose on his forehead. Those brown eyes focused either straight in front or directly on her. Always half a step ahead of her, between her and the paparazzi. He’s not tall, but he’s solid. Safe. His lean muscles showing even with his white t-shirt that he has no right to look so beautiful in. The camera loves his face almost as much as she does. 

And there she is next to him, their fingers twined together, her dress short and pink, her lipstick deep berry red. Her blonde curls are perfectly tamed and her dark eyebrows are entirely untamed. She knows she has a disconcerting look.

No, she _loves_ the way the two of them look next to each other. A strange but powerful couple: Allie, an English transplant who was nominated for her first Oscar at age thirteen, more than half a lifetime ago, and Harry, an American actor starring in Netflix films that have garnered him a devoted, cult-like following. On screen, he’s known for his easy, effortless charm and likeability, immediately hailed as a new kind of rom-com star. As a twenty-four-year-old man, he’s young enough to still be playing a teenager; as a twenty-seven-year-old woman, Allie can’t help but wonder when her clock might start ticking, grateful that it hasn’t yet. 

Harry gets annoyed by the articles, but Allie doesn’t. She acts like it’s because she’s been around longer, but that’s just pretend. She doesn’t get annoyed because she simply _gets it_. All it takes it one look at photos like this, of the two of them next to each other. 

It’s simple. They look timeless. 

Like they could never go out of style. 

* * *

“You look good together,” Will says dismissively, and it stings. 

He says it like it’s easy to look good. It’s not. When she was a kid, she was a tomboy and never thought she would care about any of this. But she loved acting and felt it calling to her, so loudly it couldn’t be ignored. And so she started acting, slipping in and out of different personalities like magic. Then her look started changing, too, until she realized it was her one currency. This blonde hair, these blue eyes. She used to think acting was about making the audience feel something, see something, mold this fake reality until it becomes more real than reality. But in the end, they see all that through her physical being. And that takes work. 

But Will acts like she’s superficial. He’s a photographer she’s worked with a few times. He thinks everything should look perfect, but even he can’t see that a woman can’t look like this without effort. He thinks photographs are about lighting and placement and a million other objective things. He doesn’t know she’s entirely subjective. 

She can see that photo of her and Harry on Will’s phone. She and Will aren’t dating. She isn’t dating anyone. But sometimes she and Will fall into each other. 

“We do,” she finally says. 

She leans over to look more closely at it. That smile on her face was real, that warmth in her face was real, that hand holding hers was real. She only feels that with Harry. It’s the most real thing out there, for her. Maybe that’s why she likes to look, a voyeur on her own life. Their moments are so brief and so irregular. She wants to hoard them. 

“Are you jealous?” she asks, trying to sound like she’s kidding. It doesn’t work. She’s never a good actor around Will. 

“What would you do if I were?” he asks, face still tilted down, just his eyes looking up at her. 

When Harry does that, she melts. Now, she just shrugs. Maybe she looks at Will with the same clinical detachment that he levels at her. 

“I mean, I get it,” he says, recovering quickly. “You’re both such big stars.”

The way he says ‘big stars’ with such emphasis makes Allie feel like she and Harry have a galaxy all their own. Then she realizes that he’s actually talking about publicity. He views Harry as a class apart — a class down from her. That might be true in the most technical sense, but Harry is more than that. He transfuses every scene he’s in with light and joy and fun. That’s its own kind of magic. 

“Yeah,” she says brusquely. Maybe Harry does like the bump in his fame, the credibility and maturity she lends him, and maybe he figures why not — their sex is great. Maybe to him, it’s all for show. But he’s shown her things in the dark, when no one else is around. He’s shown her things he doesn’t even know she’s been seeing. “Harry Bingham,” she says slowly. She likes how it sounds. She saw him in a movie before she ever saw him in person, one day when she was in the mood for a teen rom-com. Just like every other straight woman out there, she found him magnetic. Beautiful. But it didn’t prepare her for how he looks so close. How he looks even closer than that. 

She blinks and looks up at Will, who’s staring at her steadily. His brown eyes aren’t much darker than Harry’s, but there’s something so different there. Looking at him, she doesn’t feel a single thing. And Will looks at her like he’s seeing her through a viewfinder. To him, she’s something to be studied but not known. Just like everyone else. 

She stands up. “Helena is calling,” she says without preamble, knowing he can’t say anything in response to her manager calling, and she walks away. 

* * *

Sometimes there are photos of him with other girls, too — models and singers and actresses. Beautiful girls, almost as beautiful as he is. There are dozens of women who aren’t her, and who knows how many more aren’t caught on camera. 

Kelly Aldrich most of all. She’s a confessional singer-songwriter, whose indie sound made it seem certain she’d never have more than a niche audience, but her sophomore album sold big. Even more, she’s now rumored to be writing her third album about none other than Harry Bingham. 

If Allie could create, she would create for him. She _does_ create, in her own way, transforming herself across personalities, across universes, across centuries. She’s been with him so few months that she hasn’t even filmed a movie since meeting him, but she can create one in her head every time. Whenever they’re together, even if only for a few hours, they have their own little movie. The thrill of meeting, the short but intense agony of anticipation, the still-shocking pleasure of consummation, the pain of parting. 

When they’re apart, she realizes what an illusion that is. The movies have a beginning, a middle, and an end; she and Harry are stuck in a perpetual middle, rising and falling and tormenting her at every step. 

But just like in a movie, she has to act through it all. Act like her feelings are casual, like she doesn’t want him, like doesn’t miss him. She pretends that she doesn’t love him. It’s the hardest she ever works. She must be too good at it; he always believes her. 

* * *

He pulls up on her street in the middle of the night. She’s in the city, in her penthouse apartment, but she can recognize his headlights in the dark. This has happened a few times, but she had him memorized after just one time. That was all she needed; he left her with a permanent mark, even if just in her own head. 

She runs out and into his car, a shiver up and down her spine at the lack of cameras, lack of anyone paying attention to them. It feels like they can be normal, just for a second — like another universe, where happiness can be simple. He looks over at her, brown eyes steady on hers, and then he grins at her. It’s bright, and the glowing warmth fills her, too, melting whatever willpower she might have. He grabs her hand before he speeds out of the city. 

She has a vacation home in upstate New York. She never shared it with anyone, until him. It was her own personal sanctuary, but there isn’t any part of her she doesn’t want invaded by him. 

They spend the whole car ride talking — his failed auditions, the people in their lives they have in common, their dream projects, their murky futures. They never reference those futures as lines that might intersect, let alone intertwine. She’s used to it by now, but once they get to her house, she makes a beeline for the alcohol, pouring out whiskey for both of them before he’s so much as dropped their bags on the floor. 

Soon they’re laughing again, happy again, his hand on her thigh, one of her arms draped over his shoulder. Connected, skin-on-skin but deeper than that, too — feeling each other’s laughter and happiness until everything good feels infinite and everything bad fades from memory. 

She kisses him with the excited electricity of a first kiss, and all the desperation of a last kiss. 

Hours later, he’s shirtless in the kitchen, making them grilled cheese sandwiches from some frozen bread and no-expiration-date ‘processed cheese food’ that he found in the back of the refrigerator. Anything is good enough for her after that. She’s sitting on the counter, in nothing but his white shirt. He leaves the stove to pour her more wine, lips against her temple just for a second. Then she’s staring at the planes of his bare back again, the way his muscles move like art. Then she notices four faint pink scratches from one of his shoulder blades up to his shoulder. She wonders if she should feel guilty, that her pleasure will cause him a sting of pain for the next few days. 

She doesn’t. 

“I see you’ve been out with Kelly again — and some others,” she says then. She doesn’t even mean to say it, but she does, wondering if that mark is just something transitory. Maybe Kelly has a deeper mark on him, down all the way to his heart, where Allie has left him pure white as snow. 

He looks back at her, his expression blank again, like she’s the paparazzi this time. “Yeah,” he says, his tone giving nothing away. He says it so simply he might as well have just shrugged. To him, there must be no conceivable reason to lie. 

She knows that’s true; she has no claim to him. The only ways she possesses him are the same as those other girls — casually, occasionally, temporarily. She almost laughs. “Yeah,” she agrees. “Me, too.” He isn’t the only one for her, either. The only quantifiable difference between them is that somewhere inside of her, he _is_ her only one. 

Again, he looks back at her, but this time his brown eyes are intent on her face. She tries to see something there, but she can’t trust herself to not project hurt onto him. It’s late; they’re too close to her dreams now. He always wants her in her dreams. 

He grabs the pan and brings it over to her, unceremoniously sliding the sandwich onto the plate she’d gotten out. With the spatula, he roughly cuts it in half diagonally. 

He takes his half and then walks around her kitchen like he owns it. The pan in the sink, opening and closing cabinets without hesitation. She thinks about telling him to leave, just for a second. There isn’t a scarcity of men out there. Maybe Harry is the only one who looks like _this_ , who makes her feel like _this_. But there are others. 

He comes back to her, standing in front of her, and she pulls him to her without another thought. 

Maybe they’ll be trapped in this purgatory forever. 

She supposes there are worse things. 

* * *

He meets her outside Gwen Patterson’s house, out in Brooklyn. They never agreed to meet at this party, but Gwen is a fellow actor and a mutual friend, so it easily became something else unspoken between them. He pushes himself off from the wall and has her face between his hands in just a second, kissing her desperately. She kisses him back, right there on the street, knowing but not caring that they don’t have the cover of darkness yet. 

He pulls away, putting his arm around her shoulder as they go inside. She wishes she could hang onto their closeness forever, but the house is jam-packed, and she isn’t the only one drawn to him. He’s smiling and charismatic, and other people pull him away from her. He’s charming like the devil. 

She immerses herself in conversations with Elle and Gwen and dozens of others, but he doesn’t forget about her. The next couple hours, when he walks by her, he always puts his hand on her arm or on her back, just briefly, like he isn’t physically capable of walking past her without touching her. She wonders if he does that with the other girls. She’s never felt cared for so carelessly and carefully, simultaneously — the dichotomy beating against her brain and driving her crazy. 

But what can she say? She fell in love with him unintentionally, and her love grows every day ceaselessly, no matter how much she wishes it away. He’s not the only one giving out mixed signals. 

The next time he touches her arm, she knows something is different. He grips her like he’s startled, and when she looks at him, his face is creased into worried lines. They’re surrounded by people, and she leans into him to create the illusion of privacy. “What’s wrong?” she asks softly. 

He grabs her hand and pulls her out onto the balcony. She stands in the breeze with him, trying not to shudder. The atmosphere is immediately oppressive. “I didn’t get the part.” He isn’t looking at her; he’s looking past her, out into the darkness. Dark and brooding. He’s never looked more like James Dean. 

“You had an audition?” she asks. She just stares at him, at the way he winces at her question. They’ve slept together a few dozen times, but nothing more than that. They’ve told each other secrets in the dark, but he’s never come to her for support. She wonders if it’s just her proximity that has him standing here, telling her about something he never would have allowed her to be privy to otherwise. They’re in the same industry, and he can’t even tell her about an audition he cares about enough to make his face look like that — surely more than he’ll mourn her at their inevitable separation. 

“Jesus Christ, I guess I’m just going to be in fucking Netflix rom-coms my whole life.” He runs a hand through his hair in frustration, then finally looks at her, his brown curls slowly falling back into place. It takes her mind forcibly back to _To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before_ , where she first saw him. He looks like he’s in one of those movies right now — with his wide, hurt eyes, standing across from a pretty girl. 

“Harry, you’re great in them,” Allie says softly. “People love them — and they love _you_. That’s _amazing_.” She doesn’t know how to say it more clearly than that; she’s been in the industry nearly her whole life, and he bewitched even her. 

“I wish I were like you, Allie. You’re so fucking talented.” His tone is bitter, like her talent has the ability to diminish his own — like they’re in the midst of a zero-sum game that she never signed up for. 

She feels her eyes narrowing. He still looks angry, and she doesn’t particularly care anymore. They stare at each other. She wonders if this will be the last time she sees him through her own eyes, not filtered through a camera lens — someone else’s eyes and words controlling him, moving him in that charming, effortless way he projects onscreen. Maybe better than reality, in the end. He really did fool her, too; she fell for him that first time, in that first movie, just thinking: _if only I could meet him in person_. And he has the nerve to think his acting isn’t special. 

She turns around and walks back into the party. She spends a few more hours there, talking to Elle and Gwen and then Helena once she shows up. Harry doesn’t find her anymore; he might be in the crowd, but she stops herself from searching for him. She drinks glass after glass of Gwen’s favorite wine.

“Do you want to go?” he asks, his voice unexpectedly in her ear. 

She spins around, and there he is — messy curls and _beautiful_. He’s always an electric shock, but never more so than after hours of thinking she might never see him again. She reaches out and tugs on the collar of his pale blue button-down, as though she has to make sure he’s corporeal, and his hands go to her waist. “Take me home,” she says simply, a weight lifted from her body as she realizes she’ll have at least another hour to look at him. 

Allie’s driver takes them, and they sit silently in the back of the car, as though neither of them can talk through the heavy air. She looks at him now and then, but he stares steadfastly out the other window. So she contents herself with looking at the back of his head, wishing she could see him rationally. But she can’t; she adores him.

She’s mourned never seeing him again a hundred incorrect times. It’s strange to think she’s probably correct this time. She reaches forward and threads her fingers through his soft hair, his curls moving through her fingers like they have a life of their own. After a second, he leans into her touch. She smiles. He half-turns back to her, leaning against the seat. Silently, she leans her head against his shoulder and closes her eyes, feeling him grab onto her hand. 

When she was a teenager, she worked so much that she rarely got to feel like one. But _he_ makes her feel like that. He takes her back to the dream of it all, back to the thrill of getting a text, back to the sound of her name from his lips alone making her grin, back to this schoolgirl crush. She could’ve lived all these months on that crush alone, if she hadn’t been stupid enough to fall in love with him — the real, adult, earth-shattering kind. She’s not a teenager and hasn’t been for nearly a decade. When that love didn’t burn out, it shaped her into something new. 

She’s met a lot of people in her life, but Harry is the only man she’s loved to distraction. 

They get back to her building, up the elevator and inside. He pauses in the doorway, and then doesn’t even take off his coat. He just stands there, hands in his pockets, in the glow of the hallway light. She smiles wryly at him, certain this is it. 

“I really am sorry about your audition, Harry,” she says, resisting the urge to ask him the details, choosing instead to be graceful at this predestined end. “I wish you all the best.”

“Thanks,” he says. He steps further into her apartment, like he’s discovering uncharted land, even though he’s been here a hundred times before. He’s kissed her against this hallway wall several times, her back pressing against it, holding her up when he felt too good. Maybe that wasn’t noteworthy enough for him to commit to memory. 

She wonders how it will feel to never again wake up next to him, seeing that pale skin and dark curls in the morning light, where everything looked beautiful with innocence and possibility. The dark, grimy thoughts were always washed clean in the morning. Jealousy stopped existing, and his eyes only saw her. Entire lifetimes were imagined during those mornings, and the evenings spent scrubbing her mind clean of them. 

“I wish you wouldn’t compare us, Harry,” she says, wanting irrationally to allay this anger he’s holding towards him. If this is an end, she doesn’t want to be at fault. 

“How could I not?” he says, giving a short, bitter laugh. “You’re _all I think about_.” He leans against the back of her couch, looking at her steadily. She should have all of his expressions memorized by now, but this is something new. It freezes her in place, stealing even her breath. 

For just one second, she feels the sharp pain of hope — as though fate has collided in enough ways, enough times, punished her enough for some past sins. “Me?” she asks, controlling her expression more than she ever has before. “Or my career?”

His head is still tilted down, but his eyes look up at her, smiling that slow, secret way that always melts her. “ _You_ , Allie. But I know I’m not good enough for you.” He lets out another laugh and then looks straight at her. “I thought maybe I could close this gap between us, even just a little bit, if I got into some big-budget Marvel movie. God that sounds so fucking dumb — neither of us even _like_ those kind of movies.”

She can’t help but let out a laugh of her own, a little strangled. Her face is flushed and her mind is reeling. She walks to the other side of the couch and sits down hard, and he follows suit, his body turned to face her. Without seeming to think about it, he grabs her hand.

“Allie, you’re so beautiful and so talented. How could I not fall in love with you? And then I realized that I would never be good enough. Why do you think I hate those fucking articles so much? They always point out the space between us, talk about how you’re too good for me. Like I don’t already _know_ that.” 

She stays silent, looking at him intently. The expression on his face is even more eloquent than his words. It was like she hadn’t known that he was concealing something until the veil has lifted, and now he’s looking at her with openness in his expression that’s never been there before. Then, crashing through her own defenses, she feels hope breaking through the surface.

“Did I ever tell you that two weeks before I met you, I saw you in _Little Women_?” he asks, smiling softly at her. “And then, when we met, for a few minutes that was all I could think about — how happy you looked running down that street in the beginning of the movie, how sad you looked crying in that attic. I never cared much about _Jo March the character_ , but I cared too much about _Allie Pressman playing Jo March_. And then when I met you, all I wanted was to see you that happy all the time. God, does that even fucking make sense? There’s no one like you, Allie.” 

“Harry,” she says, sighing out his name. She pulls her hand from his, watching hurt flash across his face, and then she reaches out, holding his face between her hands. She looks into his dark eyes, her heart speeding up, his dark eyes so wide and steady that she feels like she could drown in them. “I’m that happy when I’m with you,” she says. She remembers that scene — remembers feeling like flying, like freedom itself. That’s how she feels right now, as her brain rewires itself. That soft look in his eyes transforms what she thought would be an end into a beginning; it stitches up all her wounds. When she thinks about the past, she thinks about him always standing protectively in front of her, the way he talked about future roles with desperation that seemed too fervent at the time, the way he would talk to other people about her with a bright, warm glow.

He’s always treated her like something precious.

“I love you,” she says, and the words feel inadequate. “I love you — just like you are, Harry.” His hands go to her waist with no hesitation. His grip is firm, the only thing between them the thin fabric of her dress, riding up on her thighs. Her hands move back to his hair, her fingers sliding through his curls. She wants to kiss him, but she can barely move — she feels like she’s in a fairytale, and there’s some spell that she might break. She’s kissed him a thousand times, but this will be a new kind of first. 

“Allie,” he whispers, and that is her undoing. It’s always been that simple — his voice like a magic spell, his touch like fire, his face like poetry. All of him, utterly irresistible. 

“You’re really mine?” She stops just inches from his lips. They’re so close that he’s out of focus, his face the only thing in her line of sight. 

“Always.”

And she pulls him to her. The kiss is different this time. That same old desperation, but she can feel him smiling against her mouth, and then she pulls back, laughing. He laughs, too, lips going to her neck as she climbs gracefully onto his lap. Her arms go around his neck, kissing him again. Then she gets lost in him — his lips, his tongue, when he pulls away and bites softly on her bottom lip. The way he goes back after only a second, knowing it wasn’t enough for either of them. 

The pleasure wells up in her, like it always does. She hadn’t known good could feel this good, until him. She didn’t know it could feel even better, until now. Her hands are on his shoulders, and then she’s pulling on his coat, yanking it off of him inelegantly. She tosses it to the side, and it falls to the ground with a satisfying sound. 

Then they unravel completely. 

* * *

The next morning, she doesn’t mind the flashing cameras. They’re still as blinding as always, but she can see Harry perfectly, just in front of her. He looks back at her, his entire body surrounded by the glow of camera flashes, making him look like a fallen angel. Then he grins at her, and she grins back, squeezing his hand. The insignificance of it is what feels so significant to her. His quiet, friendly laugh as he holds open the door for her, sliding in just a second later.

“They’re going to have a lot to say today,” Allie says, looking past him, where they’re still taking photos despite the black-tinted windows. The two of them transformed overnight, and she’s sure even the paparazzi can sense it. 

“Maybe we should say something first, then.”

She looks at him. He has a wide smile on his face, and her heart skitters. “What do you mean?” she asks. 

He throws his arm over her shoulder and pulls her closer to him. She watches him pull his phone out, turning the camera on them. Without even thinking, she turns and kisses his cheek just as he takes the photo, then once more just for herself. They both look at his phone — her red lips against his cheek, his smile boyish and giddy and undeniably love-struck. He looks familiar and new. She’s never even seen that smile in the movies he’s in. It’s all her own. 

“Post it,” she says, kissing his cheek again. He turns to her and kisses her on the lips. At first she feels silly over her own giddiness, back to those teenage feelings she missed of having a boyfriend post a selfie of the two of them. Her heart has been his, for longer than either of them realized, the feelings taking root and growing so deeply that now they feel innate. But she still feels overjoyed from it, the declaration something greater than being claimed by him. Now, finally, they’re lucky enough to have equal feelings. 

She’s always been too blinded by doubts to try to look at their future, but everything is different now. 

She’s in the clear light of day, and she still only sees him. 

**Author's Note:**

> Finally getting to write a fic about my favorite Taylor Swift song was delightful! I know we're several albums past 1989, but Style will always have my heart. 
> 
> In case it wasn't obvious, Allie's career is based on Saoirse Ronan's and Harry's is based on Noah Centineo's. Yes, it is a wild combination.


End file.
